Changing of the Guard

about that…

The pain intruded on his focus, and he shook his head, letting the thought slip away. It didn’t matter why he had a headache, only that he had it.

He was nearing the edge of panic. He could not tie down where he was: dream, VR, or… reality?

He was almost certain nothing was real. The scenes changed too rapidly, days into night, trees into flowers, the beach into this forest.

And he hadn’t felt hungry or needed to eat.

But the headache — you just didn’t get headaches in VR.

Unless it’s some experimental technique?

He remembered something he’d seen in an MIT chat-room. A grad student had claimed he could generate a realistic internal pain by simultaneously stimming acupressure points while keeping surface nerves stimmed to provide a focal point for whatever location he wanted. The problem was that the sensation was entirely subjective and hard to replicate from person to person.

Okay. Go with that idea.

If it wasn’t real, then it had to be either VR or a dream.

What if this were real? What if he’d… gone insane and was hallucinating all of what he’d seen, mixing it with reality?

Maybe he was stumbling around in a forest somewhere, brain damaged.

He shuddered.

But he wasn’t a forest kind of guy, generally. How would he have gotten there?

Another possibility occurred which was almost as terrifying: Perhaps he’d been kidnapped by one of Net Force’s many enemies and was being softened up for torture? Not particularly smart, since he couldn’t give them much except how to run computers. Most of what he did wasn’t particularly top secret — at least the process wasn’t.

There was something about that, enemies, but he couldn’t quite reach it…

Drifting again. Keep it together, Jay.

“Hey!” he called out. “If you want me to talk, I’ll talk! Let’s go!”

The scene shifted suddenly, and he stood on a dock near the waterfront. He wore a black trench coat and a long red scarf. A fedora was pulled low over his eyes.

Now what?

He remembered this scene, though. It was from a VR module he’d used to track some of CyberNation’s money a while back.

He looked at his hand. There was the girasol, an opal, he’d created to cloud men’s minds in the pulp-fiction- based scenario.

But there was no one to use it on, and his mind was cloudy enough, thank you.

He looked at the jewel for a moment. Maybe he could hypnotize himself, maybe figure out where he was. He pulled it away from his face, but it changed.

The opal became the glittering, nickel-plated barrel of a Colt Single-Action Army revolver. He looked down at himself again and saw chaps and spurs over blue jeans. He was wearing a silver star.

The cowboy scenario. It had to be VR. This was another one of his.

The transition had been flawless, completely without flicker, no sense of data upload, no shimmer, a perfect cut.

He looked up and saw that the docks had become a ghost town. There was a frightening sense of bleakness, isolation. He was alone.

He shook his head again. Even ghosts would be welcome about now—

Wait a minute. What if I’m dead?

He looked around at the scene and frowned.

Shootout at the pearly gates?

The pain behind his eyes intensified and he figured if he hurt this much he couldn’t be dead yet.

He walked around the town looking for something—anything that would give him a thread, a clue, something that would give him an idea as to why this was all happening.

Through the swinging doors of a saloon he saw a carpet bag on a plain wooden table. He glanced around once, then approached the bag, his spurs jangling with each step. The bat wing doors creaked behind him in the wind.

In the carpet bag was a hardback book by Rudyard Kipling.

A sudden, mouth-drying fear came to him. He really didn’t want to open this book. Really.

I’ve got to know. I’ve got to find out.

The book was an old one, with baroque, detailed color illustrations on the left side of the page at the beginning of each story.

He flipped through the pages and stopped to look at a painting of a jungle, with thick banana plants and lush greenery surrounding dark tree trunks. The artist had done a good job of rendering: There was an almost hyper- real, photographic quality to the scene, yet the colors were reminiscent of watercolor, vivid and clear.

As he admired it, his sense of worry grew stronger. He was staring at a portion of the jungle, a hanging vine that had been painted on a tree to the left of the illustration, when he noticed the frame of the picture grow larger, opening wider, and wider. As he stood there, amazed, the borders expanded past him, closing, swallowing him into it.

He was in the jungle.

And there, way in the back between two fronds, was a slice of orange color. Not the color of a fruit, but of fur.

Tiger!

It was the tiger that had gotten him before, the one he’d seen in the VR scenario during his involvement with the quantum computer.

Jay turned and ran, screaming, and while the pain in his head pounded with each step, that didn’t matter. He had to get away.

He climbed a tree that seemed to stretch as he climbed, bark chipping under his fingernails, his fear driving him. It was as though he were climbing a conveyor belt in the wrong direction, carried down as he tried to climb up. Eventually, through a sheer burst of terror, he made it onto a large branch.

The tiger, the tiger!

Jay stared down at the jungle floor, but the creature had vanished as silently as it had come.

That’s the tiger that got me before!

The last time it had left him near death in a coma.

Coma…

The word resonated in his head like the sound of a giant gong, and the headache pain he’d felt all morning intensified.

Suddenly, Jay was terrified.

What if I’m still in that coma? All the other stuff — Saji, the baby, Alex and Toni retiring — what if none of that ever happened? What if I’m still lying in a bed, dreaming?

The thought was scarier than anything he’d contemplated yet.

The silent jungle seemed to close in on him, and Jay clung to the tree as his ancient ancestors might have, hoping against hope that he was wrong—

And wondering how to figure it out.

New York City

Cox was on a roll. The calls, the e-mails, the faxes, those never stopped, and whatever else was going on, there was business to conduct, business at which he was expert and experienced. You didn’t get to sit around and wring your hands in his world when problems arose, no matter what they were.

You kept moving or the jackals would pull you down.

Jennie, his secretary, spoke over the intercom. “President Mnumba on line five.”

Cox touched a button. The man’s image appeared on his computer screen, just as his own visage would on